"Parking Space" Online, DropBox, For Example -- Thanks For Being Able To Share

Most of the articles I write get submitted electronically, which beats the heck out of what I had to do decades ago, namely, snail mail or overnight, or faxing. After making a copy to keep... or, in the really old days, having made a carbon copy, using carbon paper. For some of my music reviews for the Boston Globe, I got in my car and drove over to Morrissey Boulevard, and handed my hardcopy to somebody. In the early days of the online personal computing world, I sometimes got to submit electronically, by dialing up using phone and modem, and pushing the article into their system as directed.

These days, not so hard:  it's either email, or directly to the content management system.

But for larger files, like multi-megabyte fotos, or video, that's a bit much for email. I can create passworded directories in my web site, but that takes a few minutes... and adds more megabytes to keep track of and delete, if I don't want to go overquota and pay more.

I've got a paid FlickR account, which means space isn't a concern, but FlickR sizes down the fotos, and I've found it a PITA (ache in the posterior) to organize, plus I haven't yet figured out how to set up specific access shares. Ditto YouTube and some other media-posting sites I've got accounts with.

Fortunately, there are bunches of services offering free/fee online space, which can be shared. (Spacewise, I could simply email via Gmail, but that doesn't solve the problem of overwhelming the recipient's mailbox.)

I've just started trying DropBox.com, I set up an account a week or three ago, just logged in, created a sharable folder and "invited" the intended recipient.

 Eric Grevstad, my sharee du jour (who reports, "I always wanted to be a sharee. Now I've got ''My Sharee Amour' running through my head") says it works fine... he declined to download the DropBox program, but (as I presumed it would), browser access worked fine.

Another day, another small success!